One of the most important living Russian writers, Viktor Erofeev, in an interview with Novaya Gazeta, gave an illuminating definition of the Russian president and his warlike manias: “Putin is a gopnik [delincuente callejero], and he began to wage war because he was bored”. The term, impossible to translate precisely, was widely used in Soviet times as a derivation of the acronym GOP which meant “Citizen Association of Abandoned Children” (Gorodskoe Obščestvo Prizora), or another corresponding to “Citizen Shelter of the Proletariat” (Gorodskoe Obščežitie Proletariata). In both cases, reference is made to that part of the population without a stable address, made up mostly of children and adolescents, who wreaked havoc in the streets of many cities -especially in the republics furthest from the center of the empire- and who somehow way had to be kept under control.
The gopniki also represented an informal counterculture, resistant to ideological liturgies, socially marginalized and with an extreme and violent propensity to seek material compensation and affirmations of their own identity, rejecting official moral values. They were generally people from unstructured and unwelcoming families, which were also the result of a State policy that sought to take away from natural families the task of educating, although later it was unable to take care of all citizens seriously, thus giving rise to the privilege of the powerful according to party hierarchies.
Dostoevsky had already described in the novel The Adolescent a dimension that is very present in the consciousness of Russians: the repressed desire to make “great ideas” come true and throw all their grudges in the face of the world. In reality, Erofeev represents the opposite tradition to Dostoevsky’s Slavophile, the “Westernist” line of Russians who do not believe in the specificity of the Russian culture and soul, and attack their compatriots by exposing their lack of ideal foundations and ethical consistency. Erofeev, 75, belongs to the latest generation of dissident anti-Soviet writers, and is one of the main representatives of the “postmodern” writers of the last thirty years, along with Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Pelevin, the trio of “enemies” each increasingly harassed in the Putin years.
A friend of Gorbachev and of the politician Boris Nemtsov, assassinated ten years ago by the Chechen assassins of Putin’s obedience, Erofeev recounts that the latter had affirmed several times, after having been Yeltsyn’s political dauphin, that he deeply regretted having allowed the power would pass into the hands of a character like Putin, who “represents the worst of the Soviet heritage”. Indeed, the former head of the KGB/FSB, summoned at the end of ’99 to control the Chechen rebels (the war that anticipated the current one in Ukraine), had tried in the first decade of his reign to appear moderately liberal, even in the centralization of oligarchic power, trying to stabilize Russia in a situation of relative well-being, paying off debts and seeking agreements with the West and the rest of the world.
After 2008, when the country seemed to have reached the level of equilibrium it was seeking, the true face of Putin began to become more and more evident: a gopnik, a madman who intends to “reappropriate the world” and take revenge for all the humiliations suffered. And unfortunately the plebiscite consensus that has always surrounded him is not only the result of repression, propaganda and manipulation, although these are evident. “Russia is an illegal state,” says Erofeev, “with fake parliaments, fake governments and fake judges.” A large part of the population has inherited the resentment of the Soviet gopniki, the desire to “make them pay” to Americans and Europeans, first with the unrestrained consumption of their material goods (the “new Russians”, unbridled businessmen and tourists), and now with ruthless destruction and grotesque claims for “higher values”, when everyone knows that immorality is the real way of life of rich and wealthy Russians, like the opričniki [guardias imperiales] of Sorokin.
Erofeev also calls Putin the “tsar-patsan,” using another term for immature, out-of-control teenagers, which by extension applies to all Russians who have not been taught to accept reality by their “Soviet mother.” Paradoxically, the best of the communist utopia has been lost: the ideology, the great illusion of guiding the world towards the socialist revolution, the social state system, even the military power that challenged and imposed the balances of the cold war. Like children who have grown up without ideals or points of reference, Russians today massively support Putin’s war, beyond indifference, resignation or dissidence, because they are moved by the destructive instinct of “the worse, the better” typical of the impatient and bored subjects, a “psychology of degraded slaves”, according to the writer.
“For Putin it is not important who he wages war on, he does not fight Ukraine, but he does it only because he is deadly bored, and that defines his self-awareness: look at the gloomy expression on his face, he only becomes animated when he picks up a weapon , maybe a little when he gets on a horse… he seeks adrenaline, neither the Soviet Union nor the Empire reach him, he vents with his neighbors because it is the only opportunity he has “- explains Erofeev -. “In January he had sent troops to Kazakhstan, but Comrade Xi forced him to back down immediately, and then he took it out on those on his left.”
Erofeev’s descriptions are sarcastic and paradoxical, like all his literature, which caused him a lot of trouble both before and after the fall of the Wall. In 1979 he was one of the founders of the alternative almanac “Metropol”, banned by the regime, and twenty years later, in 1999, he wrote an “Encyclopedia of the Russian Soul”, which provoked indignant reactions and accusations of “Russophobia”, with legal consequences. and public book burnings. In this book he lashed out, through the mouth of one of the novel’s protagonists, against his own compatriots: “Russians must be beaten and shot, they must be smashed against the wall, because if not, they cease to be Russians: Russians are a shameful nation.
Precisely “Russophobia” is one of the main motivations of Putin’s war, but the problem is that it is not a sentiment of the adversaries, but a part of the “Russian soul”; not being satisfied with themselves, not being able to bear being “normal” like everyone else, the desire to self-destruct. Otherwise, the absurd bombing of the center of kyiv, “mother of all Russian cities”, cannot be explained in recent days, except by the need to silence the inner anger against one’s own contradictions. When asked if he thinks Putin will use atomic weapons, Erofeev replies that “he will certainly do so, especially if Ukraine continues to attack the newly annexed territories, but in fact he has been aiming for this result since the beginning of the war, with my Friends, we have been talking about it since March.”
The writer’s friends are Russian, Polish and French intellectuals and journalists, who comment on his latest work, Journey from Moscow to Berlin. The book echoes the famous Journey from Petersburg to Moscow by one of the few great liberal writers in Russian history, Aleksandr Radiščev, who in the late 18th century described the miserable condition of serfs in the Russian countryside. Erofeev says that he would have liked to call the book “Escape from the morgue”, because at this point “Russia is a corpse from which cockroaches escape, it is only surprising that it has survived so long”. In his opinion, there is no future for the post-Putin era, “it would take a miracle to raise the dead, perhaps a new Peter the Great founding a completely new state.”
Fortunately, Erofeev’s gloomy predictions are not based on political-military analysis but on his “Russophobic Westernism”, which does not prevent him from stating that “he wants to return to Russia soon, because I still have many friends there and I would not want to miss the miracle, if any it happens.” However, many intellectuals share his point of view on the moral misery of the Putin class, with all the disasters it has caused, such as the members of the dissolved Memorial humanitarian association, which has just received the Nobel Prize of the Peace. Through the mouth of one of its representatives, Oleg Orlov, they speak of the “mutation of Russia” that began with the war in Chechnya and has now been completed with the war in Ukraine. “It is not just about internal colonial wars of the Post-Soviet Russia is a mutation that has led to the current regime, which no longer has anything to do with the real Russia.”
That Russia that is part of the universal soul, of literature, music, art and even of the Orthodox religion, represented in turn by “mutant” patriarchs and metropolitans, no longer exists today. Only hope remains in the miracle of the resurrection, praying not to die buried in Putin’s morgue.
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